Today, hundreds of students from all over Britain will converge on Golden Square in London to learn about 'creativity' in business. On this side of the Square, advertising. On that side, the movies. Over there, radio and TV. And back there, the media financiers who make this world go round.
These are the so-called 'creative industries', where, as the words suggest, art and commerce touch most closely. But not all are agreed that they should touch at all. There is an irremediable tension between art and commerce.
Some say, like Paul McGuinness, the brilliant founder-manager of the world's best-selling band, U2, that there is no point in having the best music skills if you don't have the best business skills to back them up.
Others contend that for an artist or writer to be 'successful' means posterity, not money. Artistic integrity requires them to sign a selfdenying ordinance so far as commerce is concerned.
You can see why stock markets call these, the 'people businesses', and judge them too risky investments for widows and orphans. Private equity bankers agree. Why invest in people's relationships with people when you can invest in their relationship with an electricity cable? Bankers prefer to invest in pipelines than straplines.
The men of industry see 'creativity' coming – someone who has never run anything, head in the clouds, feet that don't touch the ground, other-worldly, contemptuous of the philistines who cannot grasp the staggering novelty of their achievements, with an ego whose size is matched only by its fragility.
The men in suits say: here comes trouble. Perhaps that is right. Such people are dangerous. They are dissidents – a threat to the established order, the conventional way of doing things.
As Picasso said: 'The purpose of art is to disturb'. And they are ambitious too. They seek power by what John F. Kennedy called 'the mastery of the inside of men's minds'. Their method? Extreme simplicity. Velázquez described it:
If a painter cannot capture in a sketch a man falling from a fifth floor window before he hits the ground, that artist will never be capable of monumental work
They can take the three humble tools at their disposal – words, pictures, music – and carve from them weapons that change the world. They make, what seems highly improbable, in fact happen. Consider just one of these powers. Words. When they are the only possible words in the only possible order.
WORDS IN POETRY
John Keats was sitting in a coffee shop with his friend, Stevens. He was writing. He said,
A thing of beauty is a constant joy. What think you of that, Stevens?
No response. Keats carried on. A while later he said,
A thing of beauty is a joy for ever.
That, said Stevens, will last for ever. And it did.
WORDS IN PROSE
Is it an accident that Kafka lives for ever, when you consider the opening words of The Trial?
Someone must have laid false accusations against Joseph K because one morning he was arrested without having done anything wrong.
WORDS IN DRAMA
Could Shakespeare have imagined that 400 years later, there would be a performance of Hamlet, somewhere in the world, every three minutes.
WORDS IN INDUSTRY
For years, Avis told Americans that because Avis was number two, 'We try harder'.
The Avis share of the car rental market rose and rose. But then, one day, Hertz explained in an advertisement:
For years, Avis have been telling you Hertz is number one. Now we're telling you why. That was the end of, 'We try harder'.
When the tobacco industry introduced a 'safe' cigarette, people were interested. Until the Department of Health ran an advertisement showing a man jumping out of a sky-scraper, with the words:
Smoking the safe cigarette is like jumping out of the 47th floor instead of the 65th.
That was the end of the safe cigarette. When William Procter and James Gamble started Procter & Gamble, they only had one tiny product – Ivory Bar Soap. Until they called it: '99 and 44/100 per cent pure'. That was the beginning of the P&G legend.
WORDS IN POLITICS
During the darkest hours, Winston Churchill was presented with the proposal for a Local Defence Volunteers Force to be Britain's last stand in a German invasion. The LDV. He liked the plan, but he didn't like the name. He changed it to 'The Home Guard'. The rest is history.
The 1918 General Election was won by Lloyd George, with four words: 'Homes fit for heroes'.
The Conservatives were helped to win the 1979 General Election, by three words: 'Labour isn't working'.
And sometimes, words, pictures and music all work together. Who is not moved, when John Wayne says, at the end of The Searchers, 'That'll be the day'?
Nobody can resist that kind of creativity. Its reach is global. It strikes a chord in humans everywhere. Nobody is immune.
You will hear it said today that without these powerful creative industries, especially the occupants of Golden Square, Britain would shortly return to an agrarian peasant society. Maybe. But that is not it at all. The real importance of creativity does not lie in economics. It is important because creativity is a force for good in people's lives. It is the hope for the future. The Nobel Laureate V.S. Naipaul confirmed the point. He was asked whether he was happy.
His answer was that you can only be happy if three conditions are fulfilled: first, you are doing something creative; second, it is going well; and third, you think (even if nobody else does) that it is important.
We are all victims of a drug administered by the gods to all humans. As human beings grow older, they grow more disillusioned. The gods are being cruel to be kind – it is easier to leave the world if 'The country is going to the dogs', or if 'It's not like it was in the good old days.' The only known antidote to the drug of disillusionment, is creativity. If the pursuit of happiness is truly the right of every human being, then creativity is the means to that end.
Usually, it is young people who dream of a better world – which is why it is so good that those 200 students are coming to Golden Square today to investigate creativity.
They need only look at three results of the 'creative industry' to be inspired. They will be deeply affected by all three of them – perhaps the three most iconic documents in Western civilisation:
- the Declaration of Independence, by the Founding Fathers of America.
- the Communist Manifesto, by Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels
- the Sermon on the Mount, by Jesus Christ.
The aim of their creativity was revolution. Their effect was revelation.
Beside creative people, who have such powers, the rest of us, the men of industry, the men in suits, are just bag carriers.